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Lay Organizations

For at least a thousand years, lay Catholics have organized themselves into associations, confraternities, guilds and prayer groups, with and without official blessing of the Church. These associations have organized believers to carry out various acts of piety: to care for the poor and sick, to provide burial insurance and assurance of care for members’ widows, to foster particular forms of prayer and devotion, and to organize feasts. Believers have organized themselves by gender, ethnicity, life-situation (e.g. mothers and married couples), occupation and social status. Groups like these are often essential to members' lives and religious practice.

Lay associations continue to be a significant part of many Catholics’ lives, through thousands of organizations like the Knights of Columbus, Catholic scouting movements, Cursillo, Legion of Mary, the Catholic Worker Movement, Sant'Egidio, Catholic police guilds, Pax Christi, Marriage Encounter, St. Vincent de Paul groups, the Xaverians, confraternities in El Salvador, and even religious dance groups, the Bailes religiosas, in Chile. In some parts of the world, membership in both secular and religious associations is often perceived to be in decline, but new lay organizations continue to be born and to grow worldwide. El Shaddai, a lay Catholic charismatic organization unknown to most Catholics in the West, may well have more members than all the European-based Catholic confraternities combined.

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Faggioli, Massimo. Sorting Out Catholicism: A Brief History of the New Ecclesial Movements. Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazer, 2014. Faggioli focuses on larger, primarily eurocentric movements like Communione e Liberazione, Focolare, Sant’Egidio, Cursillo de Cristianidad, Regnum Christi, and the Neocatechumenical Way, and gives primary attention to these movements’ relationship to the Vatican.

The Sisterhood of Our Lady of the Good Death, or Boa Morte, in Bahia is comprised of Afro-Brazilian women who practice a combination of Catholicism and Candomblé, a religion with roots in the African slave trade.

Though commonly referred to simply as bailes, the dance groups are really lay religious confraternities — sociedades religiosas — organized to express their devotion through dance. Typically about half of the members, called promesantes, are actually dancers.

Normally a town of fewer than 1,000 people, La Tirana fills with more than 200,000 people during the feast, which centers on the feast day of the Virgen del Carmen (July 16), but lasts from July 10-19.

While feasts, shrines and lay confraternities may be distinct phenomena in many cultures, they all come together through the cofradías, the lay confraternities that help define Catholic life in parts of in Western El Salvador.

A number of charismatic Catholic groups meet in Hong Kong, including El Shaddai, a Philippines-based Catholic charismatic organization with a following in the millions. These groups fill an important role in the lives of the hundred or more women who show up for weekday Masses — often on the one day a week they have off.

Sant'Egidio is a global community of lay Catholics, numbering perhaps 70,000 people in 73 countries, best known for having brokered the end to Mozambique's civil war; bringing AIDS relief to sub-Saharan Africa; and for its advocacy against the death penalty.

Perhaps as a result of their experience as urban singles, young adults in Amman have organized a youth group centered at St. George’s Cathedral in Amman and meet at least once a week for meals and fellowship.

With nine to 11 million members, El Shaddai is undoubtedly the largest lay Catholic organization in the world. In its worship, theology, and aesthetic, El Shaddai often seems more like the Filipino version of an American Evangelical Protestant mega church, but the movement is linked to and approved by the Catholic Church.

Confraternities are extraordinarily important in the life of the Church in Seville. There are nearly 600 canonically recognized confraternities and brotherhoods in the Diocese of Seville. Seventy-three of these are Penitential confraternities that process in the city of Seville during Holy Week, or in the days before it.

The heart of the Tanzanian church is the jumuiya, or Small Christian Community. These communities are especially important in rural areas where there are no priests. They meet weekly, help to develop local lay-leaders, and provide needed support and hospitality in the community.